#AutoML – Automated Machine Learning,AKA #Skynet

IMHO one of the most important announcements presented last week in Ignite was the Azure preview for AutoML: Automated Machine Learning.

I’m not going to get into details about AutoML, the best option is to read the official post from the Azure Machine Learning team (see references). I’ll do my best effort to try to summarize that the objective of this new tool if to allows you to automatically identify the best pipeline to work in a machine learning environment / scenario.

A pipeline comprises the basic steps of a process of ML

Working with data, this means sorting, filtering, check for nulls, labeling, etc.

Select a learning algorithm, SVM, Fast Tree, etc.

Define features and Labels, adjust parameters, etc

The [try / error / learn] model in each of these steps help us to improve our model, and to get better results (better accuracy).

AutoML It proposes an automatic service, where the best combination is identified to create a pipeline with the best possible accuracy. As always an image rocks the explanation

Official description

Automated ML is available to try in the preview of Azure Machine Learning. We currently support classification and regression ML model recommendation on numeric and text data, with support for automatic feature generation (including missing values imputations, encoding, normalizations and heuristics-based features), feature transformations and selection. Data scientists can use automated ML through the Azure Machine Learning Python SDK and Jupyter notebook experience. Training can be performed on a local machine or by leveraging the scale and performance of Azure by running it on Azure Machine Learning managed compute. Customers have the flexibility to pick a pipeline from automated ML and customize it before deployment. Model explainability, ensemble models, full support for Azure Databricks and improvements to automated feature engineering will be coming soon.

From here I strongly recommend reading the official documentation that is where it is explained in detail AutoML. Also, if you are familiar with Jupyter Notebooks, in few seconds you can clone and access a new library with a tutorial to try AutoML from zero. You need to clone a repo from https://github.com/Azure/MachineLearningNotebooks

The tutorial is pretty straightforward, and with little Azure resources you can see how you optimize a A Classification model with AutoML

Although for now only models of classification and regression are supported, AutoML is a tool a Keep in mind when you start working in ML.